1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

some effort, he forces out a suppurating fart; a fart that sounds weak but a
few seconds later proves toxic; a fart which fills the room with the
coagulating smells of anthraxed soil, crushed animal bones, old graveyards,
radioactive moss, sewage, stagnant ponds; one of those farts that seems
close to having physical substance; the kind of fart that Salvador Dali alone
might have been able to paint; a fart that demonstrates contempt for all and
any human purposes undertaken with any degree of constructive
earnestness; a fart that seems to have its provenance, not in ordinary or
irregular digestive activity, but in a disregarding cynicism towards truly
human society; a non-realist fart; a fart to which only a story like this can do
justice; a fart on which its plot turns.
Your nostrils twitching, you make to leave. Trotsky has his back to you,
scanning his screen. “Besides, I have more than enough to do these days
checking my portfolios against these stock market quotes. It’s been a bad
few months for the Bolsa Mexicana, you know. Shit, look at Grupo Televisa!
Down three quarters of a peso on yesterday’s close! Industrial Durango! A
peso sheared off this morning’s opening mid-price, already half a peso down
on yesterday’s! Those poor bastards who can’t spread their money abroad. I
pity them. I’m luckier. U.S. stocks rallied along with bonds in heavy trading
today as a weaker-than-expected retail sales report bolstered the notion that
a slowing economy eases the pressure on the U.S. Federal Reserve to nudge
interest rates higher to curb inflation. Buy Citicorp! Sell Pepsi!”
By this time you are in the garden. Inevitably, so am I. You see me from
afar. I am standing at the main door, holding some kind of tool — it looks,
from where you are, like a farm implement — which I now hurl across the
empty space between us, which falls with a soft clunk in the dust a yard or
two from your feet, which, after glancing at me once more, and
understanding, you pick up.
You re-enter the house. Trotsky is performing a Webcrawler search on
“Central American brothels” when the icepick pierces his pericranium.
Having performed the act more out of pity than duty (in fact, even more
strongly impelled by a wish to end this dismal story and get out of it the
only way I will let you), it surprises you that Trotsky fails instantaneously to
cooperate. You had half-expected him not to prove human at all, like the
critic Bradley in Mac Daly’s “Fog Did You Say Fog”, but there is an
alarmingly realistic amount of blood and brain tissue around, and Trotsky,
reeling like a genuinely wounded man, has turned on you and bitten your
finger!
“Ouch!” you cry, swivelling to avoid him as he lunges vindictively at you,
wincing at the loud crack of his spectacles as his face impacts with the floor.
As you look for an escape the voice of Trotsky — with some of that sharpedged
oratorical power on which all first-hand observers agree, friends and
foes alike — painfully throws words after you, words which you will never
1 (1 January 2001) 34